Contemporary Authors

• Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth - 2016 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

• Princeton University Press - http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2016/11/28/mark-williams-a-look-at-irish-gods-and-their-legacy/

  Mark Williams: A look at Irish gods and their legacy
  November 28, 2016 by Debra Liese
  WilliamsAgeless fairies inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s immortal elves; W. B. Yeats invoked Irish divinities to reimagine the national condition. Why have Ireland’s mythical beings loomed so large in the world’s imagination? In Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth, Mark Williams weaves together the fascinating stories of some of Ireland’s famous gods and goddesses, from the heroic Lug to the fire goddess Brigit. He explores the religious history in the myths, showing how Ireland’s pagan divinities were transformed into literary characters in the medieval Christian era. Recently, Williams took the time to answer some questions about Irish gods and their stories.

  Apparently Ireland has a pantheon of native gods?!

  MW: Yes! — though in many ways they are unique, and don’t look all that much like the pantheons of other peoples and places. They’re called the Túatha Dé Danann in Irish, or ‘The Peoples of the Goddess Danu,’ as it’s usually translated. They tend to be imagined as immortal, beautiful aristocrats, sumptuously dressed and eternally young. In many stories from medieval Ireland, they live in a kind of parallel world, which can be accessed via the hills and Neolithic passage-graves which dot the Irish landscape. Some of them have vivid personalities: there’s the Morrígan, a battle-goddess who sometimes takes the form of a crow, for instance, or the young and heroic god Lug of the Long Arm. My favorite is Brigit, the goddess of poetry, medicine and blacksmithing who also moonlights as Ireland’s most important female saint — or at least has been thought to.

  What is unusual about the Irish gods?

  MW: Across Irish literature, in both Irish and English, their major characteristic is ontological ambiguity: the nature of their nature, so to speak, is never wholly fixed. In the first place, it’s hard to simply identify them as gods, as they have only an uncertain and wavering link to the actual deities worshiped by the pre-Christian Irish. Ireland’s conversion to Christianity saw the jettisoning of the vast majority of deities the Irish had once worshiped, while a small number were ‘reincarnated’ as medieval literary characters. This latter process was in no way inevitable, and the Anglo-Saxons did nothing of the sort, for example: you don’t find versions of Woden and Thunor turning up as literary characters in secular story, whereas the Irish constantly worked former gods into their sagas and tales, often worrying about how to place them in a Christian cosmos. Serious suggestions included the idea that they were merciful angels, ‘half-fallen’ angels, demons, or a race of humans who had somehow escaped the Fall and so retained more-than-human powers.

  That the old gods were remembered at all was down to the deep respect for the past, which was characteristic of the medieval Irish. The Anglo-Saxons knew that they had arrived from somewhere else in the relatively recent past, but the Irish — around the conversion period, at least — seem to have thought themselves to be indigenous to their land. They were deeply invested in their own nativeness, so that their landscape, culture, and ancestry were all bound up together. (A new story was developed later which asserted that they hailed from Scythia, via Spain). But literature and shaping of a literate culture were in the hands of a clerical intelligentsia, who felt perfectly at liberty to make major changes in the depiction of ancient, once-divine figures. It is very striking how much the multi-talented god Lug (or Lugh) resembles the biblical King David, for example — both are young, handsome, royal figures, both are skilled musicians and poets, and both kill a giant with a slingshot to the head in single combat. Though there is no question that a god named Lug (or Lugus) was part of Irish paganism, one wonders how much of his ancient character actually persists in the literary Lug. This kind of remodeling might have happened to any number of the divine figures in Irish literature; far from representing the ignorant interference of clerics in ancient traditions, it actually reflects an attitude of deep respect on their part, and underscores their investment in the patterns and personages of their island’s ancient past.

  The second peculiarity about the gods is that they are often depicted as ‘fairies’ — the not very satisfactory English term for the Irish áes síde, ‘the people of the hollow hills’. It is the second of these two Irish words which was later anglicised as Shee — a term familiar to all aficionados of nineteenth-century Irish literature. Rather than being gods, in this guise they act as humanity’s idealized twin-race. They are beautiful, immortal, and gifted with magic powers, and their lifestyle is largely characterized by graceful ease. In many ways they are the forerunner of Tolkien’s Elves, but they are less solemn and remote. In this guise they balloon in number: they become an imagined people, not a pantheon.

  The third factor is that towards the end of the first millennium AD the Irish developed a complex backstory for their island, and a place for the Túatha Dé Danann was found within this elaborate timeline. They were now imagined as only one of a series of invading races who had ruled Ireland in the deep past. The climax of this kind of ‘synthetic history’ (as it is known) came in the late eleventh century, with the creation of ‘The Book of Invasions.’ In this schema, the gods were imagined as human beings who had simply learned how to supercharge their abilities with magical knowledge. They were (the synthetic history tells us) the third or fourth race to rule over Ireland, before they were in turn defeated by the incoming Gaels, the ethnic Irish. This scenario is transparently a creation of the high Middle Ages, but it became the basic imaginative frame for Ireland’s native gods until the nineteenth century.

  The upshot of all these variations on the ontology of the Túatha Dé Danann was that it was actually quite difficult for antiquarian writers in modernity — as they combed through the records of the Irish past —to spot that these literary figures had once been Ireland’s native gods. Considerable preparation of the intellectual ground was necessary, and here the newly developed scholarly disciplines of anthropology, philology, and comparative mythology all played important roles. It wasn’t until the 1870s that the idea really took off, and soon it became a cultural and scholarly commonplace.

  Why are the Irish gods less famous than the Graeco-Roman and Norse gods?

  MW: The classical gods were the divinities of two cultures which were deeply admired by later ages, and were inseparable from the literature of those cultures; the gods of Greece and Rome therefore became part of the universal intellectual and imaginative patrimony of Europe. In the Middle Ages and on into the Early Modern era, Christian intellectuals felt perfectly at liberty to adopt them as symbols, personifications, allegories, and rhetorical tropes. (Dante calls on Apollo, for example, right at the heart of the greatest Christian poem of the Middle Ages). And later, with the Romantic movement, the impulse emerged to take the classical gods down from their niches in literary rhetoric and reclaim them as images of divine power in the natural world, even as living spiritual forces. So the gods of Greece and Rome have never actually been away, and have been naturalized for centuries in literature in English.

  It’s worth noting, however, that the classical gods had no specifically national dimension, precisely because they were so universal. The Norse gods were quite different. Like the Irish gods, they were associated with a vernacular northern European language and had starring roles in a splendid medieval literature. In modernity, they could be claimed as the ‘native’ gods of those areas of Europe in which a Germanic language was spoken. This meant Germany, of course, but also — because of the Anglo-Saxon heritage — England, which gave the Norse gods a ready-made audience and a role as the ‘divine machinery’ in many forms of quasi-nationalist creative expression. The classic example is Wagner, whose monumental Der Ring des Nibelungen brought the Northern pantheon to international attention as a family of archetypal figures on a cosmic scale, explicitly paralleled to the gods of Greece. The Gaelic gods, in contrast, were associated only with Ireland and with the poorest and most remote parts of Scotland, and so seemed vague and outlandish in comparison.

  Why did someone like W. B. Yeats take an interest?

  MW: Yeats, and his friend the mystic George Russell, are really the essential figures in the late nineteenth century recovery of the Irish gods, though they had important precursors. Yeats was well-placed to take advantage of the new scholarship which had retrieved the Túatha Dé Danann as Ireland’s native pantheon. In his early-career siftings of material, he was able to boldly assert the fundamental identity of the fairies of folklore, the Túatha Dé Danann of the medieval literature, and the gods of the ancient Irish. Here the occult acted as a crucial unifying frame; Yeats was deeply invested in occultism as a system of thought, and he used it to give meaning and context to the Irish pantheon. To use anachronistic language, he came to believe, around the turn of the century, that the native gods were the archetypes of the national

  unconscious, and that it might be possible to retrieve and reactivate them, creating a system of hermetic ‘images’ with which to reimagine the national condition. To this end he attempted to establish the so-called ‘Celtic Mysteries’ — a hermetic order on specifically national lines which would invoke and stir into life these figures from the depths of the national psyche, persuading them to intervene in a conflicted present. He certainly didn’t succeed in the way that he expected, but—more than a hundred years later—more people have heard of Lug, and Danu, and Brigit than ever before, and indeed the Irish gods are the focus of several forms of renewed and reimagined modern Paganism. So who knows? They are certainly alive now.

  Is Ireland’s Immortals meant to be funny?

  MW: In places, yes, I hope so; the material seemed to demand it, but in two different ways. On one level, the ferocious weirdness of some of the medieval tales can be laugh-out-loud funny in a way that must have been intentional on the part of the saga-authors. My colleague at Oxford, Heather O’Donoghue — who’s written a wonderful history of Norse mythology — has remarked that myth tends to be the most surreal manifestation of a given culture, and I’ve tried to bring this dimension of the literature out. I dwell, for example, on a scene in a ninth-century saga in which the Dagda, the Falstaffian ‘great father’ of the Irish gods — the rough equivalent of Zeus — takes a very long time to relieve his bowels, before being spanked by a woman he is trying to seduce.

  On another level, some of the activities of those involved in the gods’ retrieval in modernity — especially in what might be called the late-Victorian New Age — can’t help but raise a smile in a more cynical era. To me it’s fascinating that a connection can be traced between major political movements that affected the fate of nations on the one hand, and the activities of a clique of irrationalizing intellectuals, fired up by some pretty way-out ideas, on the other. That aspect of things seemed to demand a certain respectful wryness, because the idea of ritually awakening the archetypes of the national unconscious is an astonishing and beautiful one, even if the actual execution could be a bit bonkers. The only such person whom I couldn’t write about respectfully — to start with — was William Sharp, the Scottish writer who posed as a Hebridean seeress he named ‘Fiona Macleod.’ He was a plus-fours wearing six-footer with a big, red face, but he wrote all his most successful ‘Celtic’ work in the guise of this wafty, Enya-like figure. He probably reminds me a bit too closely of my own naïve, teenage forays into things Celtic — all mist-shrouded dolmens and dangly druidical tat — and the act of self-exorcism led me to be unfair to Sharp. I was taken to task — quite rightly — for being too nasty by one of the referees of the book, and in revisions I hope I’ve been more even-handed.

  Finally, I have to say that writing about Liam O’Flaherty’s 1930 story The Ecstasy of Angus — a steamy bit of erotica involving the hot-to-trot goddess Fand and the love-god Angus Óg — was an absolute hoot. As the couple get down to it, O’Flaherty actually brings on a chorus of fairies who prance about brandishing dildos. It was impossible to analyze with a straight face, though I hope I’ve made the case that the story does have a dark, politically serious dimension to it.

  Why did you write the book, and what influenced it?

  MW: I had various aims in mind. First, there was a gap in the scholarship: there was no up-to-date guide to the gods in medieval Irish literature, nor to their recuperation in the modern era. In the two parts of the book I’ve tried to tell both stories in a way that makes one dimension illuminate the other. I’d always wanted to do the project: my undergraduate training was in Classics and English, so I cut my intellectual teeth on reception history, meaning the afterlife and reworking of classical texts by later writers. So we would look, for example, at Milton’s reuse of Virgil and Homer, or at Shakespeare’s allusions to Ovid, or at the links between the end of the tradition of epic poetry and the genesis of the novel. One of the things this gave me was a predisposition to read culture in terms of wholeness and continuity, rather than fracture and disjointedness. But the relationship between Irish literature in English and medieval Irish literature is very different to that between later literature and that of Graeco-Roman antiquity. With the Irish material, ‘reception’ of this sort is problematic because everything is charged with the legacy of a contested and traumatic colonial history, so my impulse towards wholeness needed considerable modification. In 1981 Richard Jenkyns — later to be my Oxford tutor — wrote a splendid book called The Victorians and Ancient Greece, which I actually read at school, and that was a big influence: Part Two could have been subtitled ‘The Victorians and Ancient Ireland.’ Another big influence was the Norse expert Heather O’Donoghue, as — of course — were the works of Roy Foster: one of the greatest pleasures of the process was getting to know him. The biggest influence of all is Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol. I read his The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles when I was seventeen, and Part One of the book is in one sense a vast expansion of his chapter in that book on the Celts, ‘The People of the Mist.’ He has also written an elegant few pages about Yeats’s and Russell’s astral adventures in his book The Triumph of the Moon, and Part Two of Ireland’s Immortals handles the same material at book length.

  One thing I hope for the book is that it might have the effect of freeing things up a bit for younger scholars in Celtic. Celtic Studies as an academic discipline emerged from various kinds of Romantic nationalism in the nineteenth century, and the legacy of that origin is only now really being assessed by scholars — we’re starting to get superb biographical studies of major figures, for example. But the most obvious consequence has been a massive counter-reaction in scholarship against anything woolly or mystical: Celtic Studies has evolved into a hard-headed and rather inward-looking discipline, focused on the production of critical editions and the analysis of the languages. Unfortunately, the field is currently undergoing a period of contraction: there are fewer places in the world where the languages are taught, and important Professorships—including that at my own institution—are under threat. I hope one thing the book might do is to say, look, as Celticists we can reach out, we can talk to colleagues in English and in intellectual history. People who work on Irish literature in English and those who work on literature in Irish hardly ever seem to talk to one another, with a few noble exceptions such as Declan Kiberd. I hope that one thing the book will do is to underline that there is genuine value in seeing the bigger picture from time to time. (That said — lest any colleagues reading this think me to be encouraging a hermeneutic free-for-all — I must say to any student Celticists out there: make sure you learn your paradigms.) But the literature — extraordinary, uncanny, and beautiful as it is — will languish in neglect until we get in the habit of claiming for ourselves significance and status.

  Mark Williams teaches medieval Irish, Welsh and English literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, where he is the June Li Fellow in the Humanities and Tutor in English. He has also taught for Cambridge University’s Department of of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, & Celtic. Williams is the author of Fiery Shapes: Celestial Portents and Astrology in Ireland and Wales, 700–1700.

• University of Cambridge - https://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/williams.htm

  Former Research Staff
  Dr Mark Williams

  Mark was a Research Fellow at Peterhouse College until October 2011. He is now a Fellow in Old and Middle English at Lincoln College, Oxford.

  Email address: mark.williams@lincoln.ox.ac.uk

  Research Interests
  Astrology and cosmology in medieval Wales and Ireland
  Representing the supernatural in medieval Celtic literature
  Celtic mythology
  The afterlife and reception of medieval Celtic literature
  Celtic literature and ecocriticism

Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth
Publishers Weekly. 263.27 (July 4, 2016): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth

Mark Williams. Princeton Univ., $39.50 (608p) ISBN 978-0-691-15731-3

In this weighty tome, Williams, a tutor in English at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, seeks to pull together the disparate strands of myth and lore over the course of centuries to provide a conclusive history of the Irish gods. "This book is the story of a nation's fantasy, and of the crossing-places where imagination meets belief ... from the early Middle Ages through the present," he writes in his preface. In tackling such a broad and complicated topic, he confronts the odd dichotomies and paradoxes present in the body of Irish lore, in which humans and gods, mortals and immortals, and the natural and supernatural are almost interchangeable. He also traces the intermingling of pagan and Christian legends to see how they shaped each other. As he examines different narrative cycles, he shows how they've risen and fallen in popularity, flirting with obscurity before finding new life in popular culture. It's a dense, academic affair, slow and studious, and more than a little daunting for its thoroughness. Those looking for lively adventures or entry-level stories may be disappointed; scholars and researchers will leap to add this to their collections. (Oct.)

• Blogtrotter
  http://fionnchu.blogspot.com/2017/01/mark-williams-irelands-immortals-book.html
  Word count: 922

  friday, january 13, 2017
  Mark Williams' "Ireland's Immortals": Book Review

  How the Christian Irish regarded their island's pagan divinities, in medieval and modern times, comprises the two halves of Ireland's Immortals. Mark Williams, an Oxford medievalist, unravels the tangled threads in texts that challenge even the skilled interpreter. Old Irish remains formidable for scholars, and the fact that the evidence exists only in copies centuries after its first renditions onto parchment, deep within already Catholic times, complicates any explicator's task. Dr. Williams remains steady throughout this study. His accessible style remains academic but blessedly free of jargon or cant. His glossaries summarize key concepts and his footnotes address arcane debates.

  His history of the gods of Irish myth examines key writings left by the monks and scribes, from the period after conversion. Williams estimates that within a half-century after the Patrician period, Ireland would have been effectively under Christian control. Although pre-Christian practices may have endured, they diminished rapidly, despite the imaginations of later bards eager to insist on secret continuity with centuries nearly up to our own. Williams separates the archaic from the innovative elements inserted into these stories and chronicles preserved within monasteries. Although these tales and accounts were tamed, a "ferocious weirdness" persists in surreal or juxtaposed scenes, distinguishing imagery from the dour scenarios in Anglo-Saxon sagas such as Beowulf, for instance.

  These Irish pre-Christian versions resemble, as in the Book of Invasions, a chronological origin myth of successive waves of those landing on the nation's shores, the configurations of Romanesque architecture. Williams compares the sagas to these simple, repeating structures which are decorated with teeming surface details. The medieval corpus, furthermore, rises as a massive edifice, if resting on slender foundations. Pseudo-scholarship at its most ingenious labored to match biblical lore with Celtic supposition. This tension, concentrating around the meaning of the "god-people" the Túath Dé, sustains itself within the literature Williams examines. Part inherited narratives, part concocted alterations shaped into a Christian mindset, these tales' impact faded by the end of the Middle Ages. The Irish seemed to lose interest. Only in the nineteenth century did curiosity revive about gods.

  Part two delves into more recent reworkings of the myths of the Irish gods and goddesses. Romanticism, antiquarianism and the occult generated speculation. W.B. Yeats and George Russell epitomized the poetic turn of the Celtic Revival at the end of the Victorian period, in the wake of a British passion for the classics and the pagan to counter the tamed, the scriptural and the stolid. Gods, as redefined by the Irish revivalists, emerge as "spiritual entities." Among the Anglo-Irish gentry rise intellectuals eager to fabricate a past for their country, rooted in wisdom of the earth and appeals to the forces lingering, despite the reign of Christendom, supposedly on fringes of the Celtic homeland.

  The ninth chapter introduces William Sharp (1855-1905). Taking on the feminine alter ego of Fiona Macleod, Williams engagingly shares this fantasist of Gaelic Scotland. In Fiona, we encounter a fabled "self-sequestered Highland visionary." Williams labels her as "an imaginary personage, albeit an alarmingly insistent one." Characteristic of this author's tone, he keeps his investigations lively even as he grounds them in careful judgement. He counters the bent suppositions and fey imagination lavished upon sources that, in modern times, create a "feedback loop." Williams analyzes distortions within American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz's The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. He adapted his Oxford dissertation oddly; the 1911 compendium persists as a New Age "crank piece."

  For Mark Williams' predecessor at his university proved both an "exorbitant Celtophile" and a misled eccentric. He conjured up the peasantry as informants for a pan-Celtic fairy belief system. Evans-Wentz incorporated an unnamed mystic's testimony. Yet this was none other than George Russell. Williams reasons that Evans-Wentz betrayed a "spiritual crush on Russell." The endurance of this account lies beyond the scope of Williams' work, but he admits he had to cut a third of his own draft. The results remain impressive, even if the source of the apt John Cowper Powys colophon beginning Chapter Nine lacks attribution to that fabulist, as obsessive as many in this volume, of strange magic.

  Nowadays, Williams tracks a second arc, again with diminishing attention to the old gods, among Irish writers. The Túath Dé and their replacements, the Túatha Dé Danann, as the Irish supernatural race, endure within the "wide uptake" by creative classes outside the isle. The fine arts alongside Celtic Paganism and Celtic Reconstructionism enshrine goddesses, notably the fire spirit of Brigit.

  Unfortunately, opposition to the ancient forces still exists. Vandalism of historic sites and a modern sculpture to the Celtic sea-god testifies to the powers of these representations as feared by Christians. Unlike other cultures where monotheism replaced paganism, Williams concludes that in Ireland, a "restless refusal to resolve" the ambiguities of the survival of the venerable if often barely recalled deities within a Christian context distinguishes that island's literary legacy within the extant sources.

  Fittingly, Williams ends his five-hundred page survey with a tribute to the late John Moriarty, a philosopher and shaman. Moriarty's "ecological and psychic sensitivity" to raise the terrain's specters signifies the restoration of "imaginative vitality." In a nation divided by income inequality and sectarian squabbles, Moriarty's vision and precision Williams's precision contribute valuable insights that may guide all those who look to the Irish tales and Celtic heritage as a relevant force of energy.

• Irish Times
  http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/ireland-s-immortals-review-brave-attempt-to-demystify-tuatha-d%C3%A9-danann-1.2910468
  Word count: 1542

  Ireland’s Immortals review: Brave attempt to demystify Tuatha Dé Danann
  Mark Williams grapples with an almost impossible task, and partly succeeds

  Galway Arts Festival actor representing Celtic sea god Mannanán Mac Lir. Photograph: Alan Betson
  Galway Arts Festival actor representing Celtic sea god Mannanán Mac Lir. Photograph: Alan Betson
  Eilís Ní Dhuibhne
  Sat, Jan 7, 2017, 06:00
  First published:
  Sat, Jan 7, 2017, 06:00

  The Tuatha Dé Danann “form a pantheon of sorts in the medieval texts, but its borders are vague and, in comparison to the clarity of the Greek gods, its personalities are bafflingly indeterminate and continually multiplying”.
  Who were these pre-Christian Irish gods? What were their names? What did they look like? Where did they live? How were they described in writing from the Middle Ages onwards? What did scholars and writers make of them?
  These are among the questions this ambitious, learned and lengthy book about Ireland’s immortals grapples with. Like one of the gods, Mannanán Mac Lir, a wily shapeshifter, the topic itself is frustratingly mercurial and elusive, the range of sources vast, and the interpretations many. Mark Williams has ventured where few would dare to tread, in attempting to unravel, describe, and analyse the Irish gods and their scribes, ancient and modern.
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  The book is not the first account of the Irish gods. Lady Gregory, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, Myles Dillon, Hilda Ellis Davidson, Prionsias MacCana, and several others, have written good books on the subject. But this is the first “to take in the whole sweep of Irish literature in both the nation’s languages”.
  It traces the documentation of the gods of Ireland from the earliest sources to the present – starting with pre-literary archaeology, and the first medieval texts, and finishing with an alarming report about the destruction of a (modern) lifesize statue of Manannán Mac Lir, erected on the banks of the Foyle near Limavaddy. In early 2015 someone sawed off the statue at the feet and tossed it into the sea. They then put up a cross inscribed with the words ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’
  Iconoclasts
  The response of the iconoclasts of Limavaddy to this particular representation of a pagan Irish god resonates, but only mildly, with the ambivalent attitude of the Christian monks who, intriguingly, provide us with the medieval accounts of Manannán and his fellow immortals – false gods as far as the scribes were concerned.
  Williams tracks the documentation of the pagan myths, comments on the disappearance of overt interest in the gods from the end of the Middle Ages to the 19th century, and then looks at the resurgence of attention and various reimaginings of the deities during the Celtic Revival and later.
  His impressively learned book is divided into two sections. Part One deals with the medieval period, and Part Two with modern times from the Celtic Revival onwards, with particular reference to WB Yeats and George Russell. He also looks at representations of the gods in contemporary children’s literature, and in music and visual art.
  The principal sources for all our information on the pre-Christian deities are the Old and Middle Irish texts usually called the Mythological Cycle, ie stories about divine beings. People are more familiar with the heroes featured in the Ulster Cycle, the most well-known being Cúchulainn, and the Fenian Cycle, tales of Fionn Mac Cumhail and the Fianna. (There is overlap, and the Fianna receive significant attention in this work.)
  Myths take flight
  The Mythological Cycle has always been less popular. Its stories in general are not found in 19th and 20th century folklore, and most of them have hardly penetrated contemporary popular culture – children’s books, films, etc – either because they have been forgotten. The major exception is the story of the Children of Lir.
  As Williams observes, “I repeatedly found that people who were unaware of Ireland’s native pantheon of deities often knew this narrative”. Indeed. Everyone knows it. It is categorised as a myth because some of the largely off-stage characters, such as Lir himself, have divine traits. (I disagree with Williams’ contention that this story is a religious fable invented by a monk. Many of the most memorable motifs in the tale – such as the transformation of children to swans – are common in international oral tradition. Readers will be familiar with Grimms’ The Twelve Brothers, or HC Andersen’s The Wild Swans. The Christian ending and the mythic introduction look like appendages to a version of the fairytale, which was well-known in Irish oral tradition.)
  Who are the Irish gods? Unlike the better known Greek and Roman gods, they inconveniently lack “sharply outlined personalities”, which would help us get a grip on them. At least they have names, such as Lug, the Morrigan, Mannanán, Bodb Dearg, Oengus Óg, and Brigit. Manannán is a sea god, Oengus Óg sometimes imagined as a sort of Irish Eros, Brigit as a goddess of light and healing. But their functions change frequently, and pinning them down is tricky.
  They live either around Tara, or in a sidhe – the fairy forts or raths which are such a familiar feature of the Irish landscape and where until recent times the fairies were believed to reside. Theories about the Irish fairies include a belief that they were originally the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Irish gods, who have gone underground and survived as fairies.
  Academic weight
  Williams hopes his book will be of interest both to the academic community and to the general reader. It is imaginative, well-written, and full of interesting information and insights about the elusive Irish gods. But its strength is also its weakness. His technique is very discursive, and he frequently enters into debate on interpretations of the material by other scholars in the field. Any reader who is not a medievalist immersed in these intricate arguments will find it difficult to appreciate or assess them. But it is hard to see how such references and discussion could be avoided.
  Under the circumstances, the book is more suited to academics with knowledge of the subject than to others. This is especially true of Part One, dealing with the early sources, themselves very complex. The second part, looking at familiar writers and their work, is considerably less demanding.
  But Williams has thoughtfully provided some assistance for the uninitiated. At the back of the book is a very useful list of the medieval texts cited in the work, with summaries of their contents. If you are unfamiliar with The Book of Invasions, The Colloquy of the Elders, or The Fosterage of the House of Two Vessels, for example, you would be well advised to consult this first. The volume also includes an excellent index, and a rich and useful bibliography.
  Huge challenge
  The author is aware that the scale of the task he has undertaken is probably excessive, and points out that each of the gods requires a full length study of his or her own. Apparently not many exist. He mentions one discrete treatment, Charles McQuarrie’s book on Manannán, and writes that Brigit would also richly deserve such an examination. In fact one has been already written by Noel Kissane, my former colleague in the National Library, and will be published in the new year by Four Courts Press.
  Williams’s book is a magnificent and exciting undertaking. As he suggests, there is material for several books in his tome. I found the best way to read it was to select individual sections and concentrate on them, one at a time. Otherwise it can be hard to see the wood for the trees.
  Roy Foster in his blurb remarks that the book is “unputdownable”. This is not a problem I experienced, so responses obviously depend on the reader’s level of erudition, interest and patience. That said, the study is reliable, it does not simplify material which defies simplification, and the author challenges rather than patronises the reader. We should welcome his daring new book with open arms.
  Eilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer and critic. She has an M Phil in medieval studies and a PhD in Irish and comparative folklore.

• Washington Free Beacon
  http://freebeacon.com/culture/forgotten-fairies/
  Word count: 839

  Forgotten Fairies
  Review: Mark Williams, 'Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth'

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  St. Brigit's CrossSt. Brigit's Cross / Flickr user stitchlily

  BY: Frank Freeman
  March 12, 2017 4:50 am

  Once upon a time I was reading a newspaper story about middle-aged women into Wicca, casting spells, and running about the woods naked in the moonlight. I laughed but my wife was more sympathetic: "They obviously didn't get to go to summer camp."

  I thought of that as I read about W.B. Yeats, George Russell, and other mostly Protestant members of the Celtic Revival trying to contact the Irish god Lug and goddess Brigit via ecstatic trances. If they had been Catholics they wouldn't have needed to go to all that trouble; they would have had a host of saints, angels, and the Virgin Mary to consort with, not to mention pilgrimages, beads, scapulars, medals, and holy wells.

  But therein lies the problem for the scholar of Irish mythology: the Church absorbed and transmuted the mythology for her own purposes. Thus the pantheon of Irish gods and goddesses, most of them local and tied to geography, never had a chance to solidify into well-delineated forms as, say, the Greek and Nordic pantheons did. "They are," Mark Williams writes in his book, Ireland's Immortals, "simultaneously a pantheon and a people," that is, fairies but also gods.

  There is "an enigmatic and patchy archaeological record," of references to the "Túath Dé," "the semi-divine ‘god-people,'" but for writings about them we only have the Church's witness and she was not interested in mythology per se but in either demonology and/or theological speculation, on the one hand, and literature, on the other.

  The first half of this book describes how Irish gods and goddesses were seen via written records up until the end of the Middle Ages; the second half covers the modern era when the language changed from Latin and Irish to English, and notable writers such as Yeats and Russell came to the fore.

  The first half reads a bit slow but is enlivened by what Williams calls the "ferocious weirdness" of Irish mythology and his own eye for wit and irreverence, such as when he quotes a "law-tract" from the early eighth century which "lumps" druids with "satirists and inferior poets and farters and clowns and bandits and pagans and whores and other bad people." The upshot of the first part is that "the more we know about early Irish learned culture, the less we can say with confidence about ancient Irish paganism." It has all been filtered through the sieve of the Church.

  Which is, perhaps, why it was Irish Protestants who tried to revive the ancient ways. The Protestant like Yeats and Russell were trying to find the richness of lore, the rootedness in the land, they sensed they were missing, whereas Catholics, such as Austin Clarke, who contributed to the Celtic Revival, were revolting against the rather Jansenist forms Irish Catholicism has been known to take.

  This second part is more interesting to the general reader because we know better the clerks trying to sing the gods and fairies of Ireland into being. Williams thinks most of this work, immensely popular at the time, was a failure overall, a "classical pastiche," though he singles out as successes, James Stephens' novel The Crock of Gold, some of Austin Clarke's work, Liam O'Flaherty's The Ecstasy of Angus, Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Bisingamen and Pat O'Shea's The House of the Morrigan, the latter two being books for children featuring the Irish goddess known as the Morrigan, a lady with whom you don't want to tangle.

  Williams also discusses the work of J.R.R. Tolkien who "affected distaste" for "‘Celtic' craziness," which for him was all "bright colour but no sense." His elves, with their conditional immortality and beauty, their longing for a lost homeland, their skill in learning and the arts, however, are clearly drawn from Irish mythology:

  Like the Túatha Dé, the elves are poignantly poised on the cusp of fading from the world altogether, either about to depart for a realm of existence . . . never again accessible to mortals, or to diminish into invisibility. It is ironic that the elves were clearly Tolkien's favourite creation, present in his thinking . . . from his early twenties until his death; he spent many thousands of hours elaborating and revising their histories in a way that would have seemed familiar to the likes of Flann Mainistrech or Gilla Cóemáin, back in the eleventh century.

  So, if you are a scholar or an admirer of Irish mythology, or just one of those "nutters, regressives and the unbalanced" that the feminist mythologist Angela Carter said were attracted to "faery," this book will feed your hunger. No need to go to adult summer camps.